Recovered MemoryToday, in the Children's Services class, the professor mentioned that children younger than 8 or 9 shouldn't really read historical fiction because they do not have a good grasp on the concept of time.
I wanted to tell my class how true this was. For I learned about time the hard way.
When I was seven, I was thinking about what I knew of history, which was not much. I asked Marlene, "Mom, when you were a kid, did they have fire?"
Somehow, that is the wrong question to ask a parent. I never understood why she screamed at me for it.
FroggerI don't think I ever posted the story about the frog. I was reminded of the frog this past Wednesday when I realized that I was supposed to tell a story for my storytelling class and had nothing prepared. So, I decided to tell every Marlene story where she is terrorized by wildlife in urban Rochester.
When I was in high school, we had a swimming pool in our backyard. However, no one in my family was really into pool maintenance. My mother would make a vague attempt at caring for the pool by waddling out to the pool skimmer every morning in her slippers. One day (it had to be a Saturday because I was helping my dad with some yard work), as she followed her daily ritual of waddling out to the swimming pool, she let out a blood-curdling scream. My father thought that an intruder was in the back yard, beating the crap out of my mom. He bolted into the yard, only to find my mom frozen next to the pool skimmer with a look of terror on her face. He followed her line of vision and saw...a small frog. The frog was underneath the pool skimmer, looking at my mother.
"Kill it! Michael, kill it!," she screamed.
The frog hopped away.
Later, my mother recounted my father's bravery at saving her from the frog. She added, "I was so scared! It had these huge, scary teeth. They had to be about 6 inches long."
We just let her go. No one wanted to remind her that frogs don't have fangs.
